The Catacomb Abyss (1992)

It's weird to think that once upon a time, games could have telephone numbers on their title screens.

Name:The Catacomb Abyss
Number:12
Year:1992
Publisher:SoftDisk
Developer:Gamer's Edge
Genre:FPS
Difficulty:3/5
Time:3 hours 00 minutes
Won:Yes (9W/2L at time of original playthrough)

Of the many games that ID Software made that SoftDisk had the rights to, it was a stroke of luck that they had Catacomb 3D. While the 2D Catacomb games are nice, they're not necessarily special in design. Dangerous Dave is clever, but appeals to a specific niche and isn't special technology-wise. But Catacomb 3D had everything it needed to be special, it was just lacking polish. Hovertank 3D, meanwhile, would be too barebones to fully flesh out.

When you capitalize it like that, I start to suspect that your secret knowledge isn't that useful.

Taking place after Catacomb 3D, the story is that the minions of Nemesis, previously known as Grelminar, have built a mausoleum next to Towne Cemetery. Emboldening them, they perform vile acts of violence to the nearby townsfolk. Naturally, they hire you, Petton Everhail, to find out what's going on and stop it.

Abyss comes firmly in the era of Softdisk games where they give you a ton of options for info at the start and an in-game help file, but there's a focus on slowly getting you up to speed in-game. There's no in-game description of your keys, but the basics are the usual. Arrow keys for movement, ctrl fires and alt sidesteps. Additional points are V/TAB for quick turning, which is vital in some situations.

It isn't perfect, but I can't say I've ever felt that this should play a different way. Turning is slow and even with quick turning an enemy is going to get the jump on you if they're behind you, but the game early on encourages cautiousness in approaching a room. The first enemy type you fight, zombies, pop out of the ground and it's easy to get blindsided by him. But it's just one at first and even if you die, you can just restart. Enemies that don't pop out like that don't become alert if you aren't looking at them. Goofy in theory, but encourages clever movement in practice.

Your attacks are not terribly changed from Catacomb 3D. There's no holding the fire button down for a nuke attack, you're just spamming magick missiles now. Enemies have a pain state which makes spamming them effective. Z fires a rapid stream of missiles if you have a zapper orb, X fires in a circular pattern if you have an xterminator orb. Xterminators do more damage than regular missiles for some reason. C causes you to heal yourself if you have a cure potion. You can carry up to 99 of each. In addition to individual pickups, there are chests which drop various amounts.

Some of the later descriptions get spicy.

The cleverest part of Catacomb Abyss, which is for once actually used in comparison to Catacomb 3D, is that the GUI constantly has a bit of text on-top related to where you are on the map. As odd as it sounds, it helps avoid the problem a lot of Wolf-clones have where the entire level is a confusing maze, because you have something distinct to place it. In a sense its cheating, but when the choice is cheating or nothing at all, I'll take it. The level design usually isn't so bad as for that to happen, but it does cinch it.

Most of the time this information comes off as telling you things you could find out by wandering around.

Rounding out the GUI are scrolls, which you read as you come across them and you can reread by pressing a number from 1-8. The requisite keys, which come in four colors and every time you open a door that key disappears. In all situations, you enter one by walking in, either one that blocks off part of the level or one that leads to the next level. Finally a radar, which if you have the gem which reads a particular enemy type, will show that enemy on the radar. Gems come on or before most levels with the enemies of those types.

The game opens with a set of graveyard levels function well as opening levels. Enemies in the first two are zombies, shades and bats, so the kind which suggest slowly checking the areas of a room to ensure you don't get backstabbed or enemies who die upon attacking you. And if you come from a game where you can open doors, the game encourages you to shoot walls by giving them descriptions such as "weakened walls" and different graphics. Along with the occasional enemy pop-up next to an item, so if you're trigger happy you find out that stray shots destroy items real quick.

That said, there are two gems in these three levels, and the game makes it incredibly obvious that they're there. Depending on how you go about it, they might just be easier to find than the keys which lead to the way out. Level 3, outside the mausoleum, also adds skeletons to the list of enemies, which are tougher than zombies, but also just stand around until you activate them.

The graveyard leads to a mausoleum/crypt, where we get our first ranged enemy, a squishy flying wizard. They're not special, your usual slow ranged attacks, but the game decides that this is the time to start putting you in close quarters where you can't easily dodge. Though, this doesn't entirely work against you since the wizards shoot infrequently and deal low damage on this level.

This section illustrates what I think the game does really well in design, wall block usage. A lot of games tend to have random choices, where it seems like they're just randomly breaking up a wall. Here, there's one used primarily for all walls, with others being used as accents or as indications that you can shoot a wall. For most of the game it works well, though once you've cleaned out an area it can feel unusually empty. Here, it helps that we get what is probably the first example of an occult area in a FPS, look at all the pentagrams and sarcifical altars!

Den of Zombies follows the crypt up, which comes off more as a cave. This one has the closest to real doors, wall pieces that when you touch them disappear. There's no new enemies, but skeletons come out of the walls in this level, which, combined with the zombies, makes the level feel like something out of a horror game. I think I was scared of this level as a kid, but in retrospect, that makes sense. How many games have you played where enemies are coming out of the floor and the walls?

Ancient Aqueduct continues with the monsters coming out of the floor, only this time it's less literal since you're standing in water. More like they come in and out of the floor. This is the most boring level, since you're simply waiting for the trolls to come out of the water, then moving through a place with basically no variation in wall texture. Which just illustrates why the rest of the game works so well, a few accents make all the difference.

The Orc Mines brings the game back to enemies which just stand around. Orcs, reusing the orc sprites from 3D, feel like a downgrade from the trolls, since they don't take a million missiles to kill. Them constantly stopping for me to shoot them is a bit distracting. I guess its intended for me to recover my zappers, as if I don't need excuses to use them when I've been hovering near the 99 mark for a while.

Lair of the Trolls is a bit of a breather, despite the trolls being fairly beefy enemies. Probably because it also introduces hourglasses which stop time for 99 "seconds". Which I suspect are tied to clock speed. Your missiles hang in the air during this and there are only so many you can fire at a time. I've never actually been in a position where this felt helpful. It just felt like something I had to wait out.

The Demon's Inferno follows. Bright red walls, nearly all of which look the same, demons, which just absorb a ton of magick missiles and you get what is not the best level. The game does break it up considerably with skeletons popping up in alcoves. You're spamming your attacks while staring at a bright red screen, which is just not good. I think this might have something to do with certain issues in these kinds of games, the developers don't realize you shouldn't be using bright colors like this.

Battleground of the Titans is two large rooms and a hallway. Do you enjoy killing dozens of big meat shields to get to a key? Do you enjoy potentially destroying a key because you were to careless with high powered attacks because you now have 99 of everything? Even when it's crap, I'll give Abyss credit for making different crap each time.

Coven of Mages adds in teleports. The game offers you five locations to go through to, but you only need to go to three. Enemies are the mages again along with giant eyes that shoot electricity. Even the later are too weak at this stage to do much to you. I wish they were just a little bit stronger.

Then we go to another area full of bright walls, but at least this time there are some accents. Still wandering around, shooting demons, because killing enemies which take a thousand hits is fun. Even the skeletons make a reappearance because demons and skeletons make sense together.

Finally, Nemesis himself. Or at least, Nemesis after fighting through a horde of demons. Nemesis is just sort of hanging out, behind one of two nearly identical corridors. You can't quite stunlock him into submission, and his shots take out 25% of your health, but by this point that's not really a problem.

The game ends with a nice, relaxing stroll to the surface, in which you can see statues of all the enemies you killed, along with being given the cheat codes to the game. Which is kind of nice, more games should have done that. Let's get to the rating.

Weapons:
I appreciate the variety, but it basically boils down to, regular attack, autofire attack, highly situational attack and healing. Because of the way enemy alertness works, the situational one is one you have to work to use properly. 2/10

Enemies:
While some enemies are too easy or too tedious, there's enough that there's a decent variety of more interesting ones. Even if the number of enemies on a level is limited and too often every enemy has the same behavior. 3/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
Something new is always being thrown at you, albeit, at the cost that what is new might not necessarily be good, just different. 5/10

Player Agency:
Your basic setup, except different weapons are special buttons rather than switching attacks. That said, the fast turn function doesn't come off very well in the heat of combat. 6/10

Interactivity:
Destructible walls and that's it. 1/10

Atmosphere:
At first, we get some decent dark/gothic fantasy elements going on. A mysterious mausoleum being built in honor of a dead lich. Wander through spooky graveyards waiting for monsters to pop out of the floor or the wall. Then we get random mines, aquaducts and then what appears to be hell. It gets a bit goofy. 6/10

Graphics:
Most artwork here is nice, but as time goes on, it feels like the game is running out of visual steam. Enemy designs are nice, but have limited animation and only face one direction. 5/10

Story:
Your basic go kill the bad guy affair. 1/10

Sound/Music:
Detailed PC Speaker, but no music. Everything has a nice sound to it, but far too often it's just silence. 2/10

That's 31, down from 34 last time. Broadly the same as last time, but a few of the more bloated categories got cut down to reasonable levels, with a few other categories picking up more points. The most significant change is that level design no longer gets an eight.

In the past, I've generally considered this one of the best 1992 FPS, despite the issues with the level design. It generally came off as doing something that ID would eventually succeed at with Doom, making a world which is not just randomly placed blocks. I still think that, but now it's tempered by how it's pretty clear that most levels were thought out with random ideas and that more worked than not was down to luck.

Next time, we return to Apogee with Secret Agent.

Catacomb (1990)

Name:Catacomb
Number:142
Year:1990
Publisher:SoftDisk
Developer:SoftDisk
Genre:Top-Down Shooter
Difficulty:4/5
Time:1 hour 10 minutes
Won:Yes (47W/48L)

Back when I was thinking up what I wanted to cover here besides FPS, there were about 5 titles I had in mind for what else I wanted to cover. Abuse, Catacomb, Heretic II, Postal and Star Wars: Battlefront. This reasoning all being that these are games that play like FPS games, but in a different perspective. Catacomb I have a very good reason for playing, its the start of the Catacomb series, which I already covered the FPS titles of. I plan on replaying those, so let's see the series before it went into the most famous FPS progenitor.
Now, the issue with this is that the Catacomb series is weird. REALLY WEIRD. The iD FPS, then the trilogy from the Blake Stone guys. These are the simple titles. The series starts with Catacomb on DOS, at least by year, then we have Catacomb II/The Catacomb. Sounds simple enough? Catacomb, Catacomb II, then Catacomb 3D. Only, the Apple II and II GS versions of the game are supposedly different to the original version. It gets worse, while SoftDisk was publishing the FPS titles as shareware games, they were also publishing Apple II & IIGS sequels to Catacomb with unusual names like Sylvan Idyll and Ether Quest. I applaud the effort, if it wasn't a pain in my ass.
I'm going to slowly work my way through these, but these are surprisingly obscure games. Sand Trap, the final game in the series period, is a colossal pain to track down. It was supposed to be released in SoftDisk G-S #72, but alas, that is not available to my knowledge. Supposedly it exists, someone has actually played it, but where is a mystery to me. Versions on the Apple II exist for all of these titles, so hopefully I can find them one way or another.

The story is, master wizard Petton Everhail is hired by Terexin, High Wizard of the Kieralon, to find all his treasure in the ruins of the Kieralon Empire. How all that treasure has remained there for 200 years? Because it is quite naturally held hostage by goblins, ogres, skeletons and gargoyles. All mainstays of the series, except for the gargoyles. Its been a while, but I don't remember any of those. There might even be a dragon!

When I said Catacomb plays like a FPS title, I meant it. It has the same general control scheme as the FPS titles iD would make over the years, not surprising considering this is one of Carmack's first action titles. Instead of turning with the left and right arrows, pressing a direction moves you in that way. Ctrl shoots, while alt holds you in the direction you're in, while you still look in the same direction. Find keys (generic, not specific color) to open doors. Its okay, a bit loose, but it mostly works.
Compared to twin stick shooters I find this control scheme slightly lacking, however, this had to work with joysticks and mouses of the day, alone. With that handicap in mind, its fine.

You have four methods of attack, plus a healing potion. Pressing the attack key unleashes a single fireball, which can be spammed for a rapid fire attack. This takes out the smaller enemies in one hit. Something to note is that shots alternate each of the two tiles Petton is on, as if he's alternating hands. You can hold it down to create a more powerful shot. This takes out everything weaker in a direct line of where you're at, equaling Petton's 2-square wide frame. This takes out bigger enemies in one hit. Its also very useful for destroying secret walls.

The other two attacks require various scrolls. The first is a bolt, which fires a series of fireballs at a much faster rate than you could possibly do without resorting to a rapid-fire button on a joystick. This is useful when there are large numbers of the bigger enemies.

The final attack is a nuke, which throws a bunch of fireballs around you. This is less useful than in the 3D entries since you can generally see where enemies are ahead of time and force them into a choke point.

Defending the treasure chests are the aforementioned creatures. Goblins are the simplest, they're the red enemies, they walk towards you, usually to a cardinal direction, and damage you if they touch you.

Skeletons are a pain in the butt. Unlike the goblins, they are aware that you alternate hands, and go in your corner areas. They also damage on touch and are incredibly annoying, but if you hug a wall they tend to just walk towards you.

Ogres are just oversized goblins. They hurt more, and you can't kill them with a single fireball. Instead you need many small ones, or a bigger fireball, which will go through as many ogres as it can within its range.

Gargoyles are giant oversized enemies, and the only regular enemy that shoots you. Its not very intelligent, but more often than not its not placed so that they can't deal a good attack at you. Despite this they aren't any stronger than ogres in the defense department.

Dragons appear only on the final level, where there are two. Guess someone really enjoys having twin bosses at the end of a game. Its huge, and it shoots massive fireballs. Curiously, unlike other enemies, it harms each enemy too. Its not too hard, but because you're likely to be out of the attacks by the time you reach here its a better choice to just dodge him and reach the level exit that way.

One big element of this game's relation to FPS titles is the number of secret walls it has. I say secret, but the game requires you to find them to win. You can detect them from non-secret walls by a single pixel on each wall, and it is as tedious as that sounds. That's partially a lie, sometimes its not there at all! Even then its not a very fun experience.

And worse still, the game frequently puts the player in situations where if he does the wrong thing, he's just ended his game. Used a key in the wrong place, whoops, you're stuck like the kind of adventure game people whine about years later. Oh, but it gets better, not only do you have to deal with this, but sometimes the proper path is just the longest possible one you could take through the level, and keys are right next to the door you shouldn't enter at that moment. Meaning if you walk one square too far you're screwed. This is the kind of game where the controls don't have that precision. It just turns into a slog as time goes on.
There are a ton of strange references to the quality of disks. The version I'm playing was modified by an Australian floppy disk maker, so I guess they wanted to make fun of all their competitors. I can't say I've ever used a floppy that didn't come with a game already, so this is lost on me. Seems like typical advergame silliness anyway.
This game doesn't allow you to save to my knowledge, and if you die, that's it. This isn't something I care for, but the length of this game isn't long enough for that to be a terrible problem. I must admit though, I used the level select cheat a few times, simply because I got tired of the opening levels. Which is of course, the real reason why I hate not having save games.

The final couple of levels are just exhausting to deal with. Level 9 seems simple, just find one key...in a labyrinth of endless, samey looking areas. At least the endless skeletons here are less obnoxious. Truely, this is the Catacomb. I got lucky when I played it, and found the key on the lower right side. Then the final level is mostly a maze of destructible walls, which you can't detect ahead of time. I'm really grateful that someone made the worst aspect of this game the focal point of a level.
What's curious about this game is that fighting enemies in wide open spaces is actually the worst thing that could happen. With basically unlimited firepower, all that really matters is your rate of fire, so having to deal with even two fronts divides up your firepower too much. If you're in a tight corridor, unless you're fighting against enemies with ranged attacks, your victory is assured.

Fun fact, that level select can be used to screw with the demo.

Before the rating, here's some footage of the game in action. I make no pretenses of being great at this game, but I did try to get a full run of the game. Died on level 7 due to my own hubris.

Weapons:
The charge up basic fireball attack is neat, as are the two attacks that need ammo, but the game rarely gives one good chance to use them. 2/10

Enemies:
The variety and simple nature of the enemies is appreciated, but they move a mit bit too fast. 3/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
Its very clear that this is someone's first time making these kinds of levels, and it feels very...bleh. It starts off decently enough, but it feels the need to pad its meager length to obscene levels with the difficulty and lack of a save system. 3/10

Player Agency:
Controls are a little loose, anything requiring precision takes longer than it should. Its also a bit tricky aiming at enemies who hit you at an angle. 4/10

Interactivity:
You can shoot walls I guess. 1/10

Atmosphere:
This feels like an ugly version of Deadly Rooms of Death, somehow. 1/10

Graphics:
Somehow, this eye-searing pain is the EGA mode. Trust me, the CGA mode is worse. At least everything is distinct. Almost everything, anyway. 1/10

Story:
Take some treasure from an ancient forgotten empire or something. Nothing matters the second you open up the game. 0/10

Sound/Music:
Simple PC Speaker. 1/10

That's 16, the same score I originally gave Hovertank 3D.

I've seen this described as a Gauntlet clone, and that doesn't seem like an unreasonable comparison to me. The only reason why this is special is because this was one of the earliest titles from the boys at iD, and that exciting titles would result from their work. Its quite neat seeing the seeds of what would be their mark on the industry begin to form.

Game 34: The Catacomb Apocalypse

Name:Catacomb Apocalypse
Number:34
Year:1993
Publisher:Softdisk
Developer:Softdisk
Genre:FPS
Difficulty:4/5
Time:4.5 hours

The fourth and final Catacomb FPS is a bit trickier to talk about than the proceeding entries. Apocalypse tries its darnedest to ramp up the difficulty. The thing is, that's not entirely good. After around the half-way point, every enemy takes multiple zappers to take down. So you either use them, or spam the control key. Or if you're smart, you'd plug in a controller with a turbo button. You use items because you just want to get things done. Which is not good considering there are seven Nemesi on the last level. Sure, if you've reached this game in the franchise, you know what you're doing, however, that doesn't make the last half fun.

New improvements in the game don't really add up to much. The manual makes much of the screen flashing to show you something important on the text bar. I didn't notice it. Either something is wrong, or its a very short flash. Not much point to it either, someone too foolish to pay attention to their text bar isn't going to read the manual to find out they should read the text bar. Let them suffer, they don't stand a chance back in DOS-land anyway. The hub system? Also feeling pointless. I could have just spammed it twice and gotten enough keys to really speedrun the later half. Walkable walls? Eh...eh...

To put all of that aside, this game really feels like they've run out of ideas. Eh, robot enemies. Orc wizards. Machinegun skeletons. Time travel. Cyber Egypt dystopia. Does any of this sound like the attempts of men doing anything other than panning a river, hoping to find gold? Its amusing the first time, but I don't see myself giving this game another go. In the future, I could see myself giving Armageddon one more shot, but not this.

Weapons:
Same as Abyss. 2/10

Enemies:
Every enemy shoots you and takes a ton of damage. Only the rare exceptions don't shoot. They look nice, but that's about it. 3/10

Non-Enemies:
Same as Abyss. 0/10

Levels:
Apocalypse's level design is designed to wear you down for the final confrontation with Nemesis. And mazes. Its just the same thing over and over again. Some of it isn't as bad as I'm saying, but its hard to tell. 4/10

Player Agency:
Same as Abyss. 5/10

Interactivity:
Same as Abyss. 1/10

Atmosphere:
The weird schizotech feel just doesn't work as well as Abyss and Armageddon's settings. 3/10

Graphics:
The color scheme is quite garish at times and several wall graphics don't match. Down a bit from the proceeding games. 4/10

Story:
The manual says this is basically the same plot as Abyss. Which I wrote as 0/10

Sound/Music:
Same as Abyss. 3/10

That is 25, two points above Catacomb 3D. Call it 24, putting it a point above 3D. I don't have anything clever to say, I'm just glad this is done. This isn't the last we'll see of the series, I haven't done the proceeding two or so top-down games. But for now, I think I'm done on hammer ctrl key games. Next time, E.S.S., or European Space Station. Why? I need a break from the more shooty stuff. Hey, I said space sims, and that is a space sim.

Game 33: The Catacomb Armageddon

Name:The Catacomb Armageddon
Number:33
Year:1993
Publisher:SoftDisk
Developer:SoftDisk
Genre:FPS
Difficulty:3/5
Time:6 hours

Catacomb Armageddon is like Catacomb Abyss. It is at its core, the same game. You throw infinite magic missiles at things that should not be; Gather useful items; Use all those items later when enemies get tough. What makes Armageddon better than Abyss is the enemy selection. Abyss had around three paletteswaps, while Armageddon merely redesigns past enemies in the series. They're not necessarily the best, but the underlying logic is the same, so that can be forgiven. What improves is that Armageddon has the best enemy selection of any Wolf-clone. I say that having a pretty good idea of what's going to come. It has been said of Doom that each enemy is unique, you can mix-and-match them as you please. That is exactly what Armageddon has, but I wouldn't say the level design makes use of that content fully.

As I said, its like Abyss. Weapons are your magick missile, infinite, but basic, zapper, rapid-fire, exterminator, outward from player, cure. Move with the arrow keys, alt goes sideways, V does a rapid turn. You need this because you have no ability to see behind yourself otherwise. Doors are usually locked, most of the time areas are separated by destructible walls. You are a wizard, you fight the evil Nemesis, a lich. Despite the seeming existence of figures from Greek mythology, they do not exist here. I'm used to this, because I like these games, your mileage may vary.

Which leaves us with the only real difference from Abyss left, the levels. There's certainly a bit of shared level progression. Each game starts with a cemetary, goes through something underground, a water level, hell, a conflict in a crypt, and ends with you going back to the surface. There's certainly surprises here. Good ones. Even the usual mazeyness of Wolf clones works here. But I have to say that its just more great level design, not something absolutely special. No, the team of Big Jim and Mike have one more game to go before they release their magnum opus. This is just a well-made game, with nothing special beyond that.

Weapons:
Same as Abyss. 2/10

Enemies:
I made fun of a few enemies for being reskins of the Abyss ones, (who are in turn reskins from 3D) but Armageddon has a genuinely well-thought out series of enemies. I would like less demons, but otherwise I think this could stand a few more games worth of content. 8/10

Non-Enemies:
Same as Abyss. 0/10

Levels:
Armageddon still suffers from the usual Wolf-clone level design issue, but other than that, its still a very impressive selection of levels. 8/10

Player Agency:
Same as Abyss. 5/10

Interactivity:
Same as Abyss. 1/10

Atmosphere:
Same as Abyss. 5/10

Graphics:
Abyss put into a blender, except a few new items are put in, making the whole package the same. 5/10

Story:
The manual says this is basically the same plot as Abyss. Which I wrote as 0/10

Sound/Music:
Same as Abyss. 3/10

That's 37. Putting it next to Bram Stoker's Dracula and above A-10 Tank Killer. As to other opinions on this game, well, apparently there are none. That's actually interesting, because despite the difficulty, this really isn't that much of a time investment. Difficult to the untrained hand, sure. People with that problem wouldn't be finishing this game anyway, difficulty or no difficulty. Next time, the final Catacomb FPS or more Galactic Empire...assuming the game finally cooperates.

Game 5: Catacomb 3D

The tale of a valiant wizard who goes to defeat his evil nemesis. I would say that's a bit cliche, but full-fledged wizards doing things on their isn't really a common plot in most stories I've seen. Usually they're relegated to the side plot. I guess Earthsea partially involves a plot like this, but it is amazing that what should be a general plot is almost never used. Catacomb 3D is this shoulda be generic plot. You are the wizard Petton Everhail, and your evil nemesis is Grelminar. Your nemesis has captured the "Nemesis of Kelquest". I think we can safely say the Greek gods are not real in this game's universe. I also recall that Nemesis is an antagonist in later games.

GETTING IT TO WORK:
There are sourceports, but DOSbox works fine.

Like Commander Keen 4&5, there's a little pong game on the main menu. Because I am not a fun person I will not be playing this game. Catacomb features three difficulty settings, labeled like ordinary difficulty settings. I'll be playing this on medium, because I don't want to get stabbed in the back too many times.

The first level uses a track from Commander Keen 4. This track will go on so long that I suspect it is the only song. I like a little mood music, but this track has about four bars repeated endlessly. It was fine in Commander Keen, but here I have to listen to it for like thirty minutes. This is not good. I've complained about other games reusing music, but in this case it is unacceptable. As to the interface, we have our little items at the bottom, our portrait/health bar to the right, and our shot power. Which gradually rise until it is in the form of a nuclear blast. We have a compass and a little note above the items. This actually makes navigation easier than Wolfenstein. Rather than having to manually check your map to see where you are in a sea of identical corridors, you have a little description to help you find out where you are. You can remember that so you know when you're near where you need to go. In theory.

Item-wise you have scrolls, which tell you about things I don't believe I encountered, in addition to potions you can use at any time, which makes this game easier than other FPS of the era, since a level you do well on will result in more health later on.

Weapons:
You have four weapons effectively. A single shot, which doesn't do much damage. A charged shot, which doesn't do enough damage. A bolt, or rapid fire item. A nuke, or shot in all directions. With exception to the charged shot, everything was more or less useful. I never really used them because I only had two for much of the game. 3/10

Enemies:
You have a small variety of enemies. Bats, which are easy to kill; The trolls, which we previously saw as mutants in Hovertank; Orcs, which are kinda there; Demons, who are reskins of trolls and take a million missiles to kill. There's Grelminar, who is a lich and is rather easy for a boss character. He was also in Dangerous Dave. Make of that what you will. 3/10

Non-Enemies:
You have Nemesis. One guy on the last level. 0/10

Levels:
The way the game is set up makes it less annoying to navigate than other flat FPS games. The descriptions usually give you a better sense of where you are. I said usually, sometimes there are giant hallways with the description "White Hallways" for half of a level. There's some interesting stuff I think. You have the first hub, beating out Hexen and Strife for first FPS to have a hub level. Sometimes they're sneaky and start you with just enough time to turn around and kill an enemy that saw you as you entered. I in particular liked the one area called "Room of the Recently Dead" which had blood all over the walls. The secrets though, eh, they're not easy to pick up on. The one secret level I found wasn't anything special. 6/10

Player Agency:
I complained of tank controls in Hovertank 3D. There's not really any difference here. Your afterburner is replaced by sidestepping. 3/10

Interactivity:
You can shoot the walls. That's neat, isn't it? That won't come back in a major FPS until Duke! 1/10

Atmosphere:
I'm not really getting a distinct atmosphere from this. Its like, eh, you're a wizard now, kill some orcs, trolls and demons. Now you're in some kind of tar pit and now you're in Hell. 2/10

Graphics:
I feel like every pre-Doom iD game I see is just stuffed to the brim with reused textures. I'm pretty sure some of this stuff was touched up for Wolfenstein. I'm also pretty sure I've seen some of the other wall textures in another game. 4/10

Story:
There's nothing much to it beyond the scrolls you find. Eh. 1/10

Sound/Music:
No. You don't get anything for this category. I listened to the same musical track for the entire playing time. The sound design is lackluster. The bumping sound against walls sounds like farting. Oddly, this was also taken from Commander Keen. I keep hearing sounds from that. How unfortunate. I don't mention it to be funny. If I wanted to be funny I'd make a whole gag about calling him some juvenile name about how gassy he is. The little boops and beeps you get when you shoot things is not enough to make up for that. 0/10

That brings us to a total of 23. 8 points lower than Wolfenstein. That's a bit shocking. I don't really think Wolfenstein is necessarily more fun than Catacomb. I guess if you picked out the best twenty levels from Wolfenstein and played those instead of the entire game that'd make sense. Catacomb doesn't really wear out its welcome. The two hour investment it takes to play this compared to the ten hour investment in Wolfenstein makes this more enjoyable overall.

Final Score: 130900